Recent published letters
The Jerusalem Post, 25 January 2012
Sir,
Accustomed as I was to the popular UK classical music station, Classic FM, I too have been greatly disappointed in the output of The Voice of Music. Classic FM, with its remarkable 6 million listeners, has thoroughly trounced the BBC's classical music station, Radio 3, which achieves only a modest 2 million. I would strongly advise The Voice of Music to examine in depth just how Classic FM achieves this degree of audience appreciation, and to change its approach to scheduling and start engaging directly with its audience accordingly. If Israel Radio won’t budge, then why not a commercial radio station specialising in classical music? The Classic FM formula has been successfully transplanted to the Netherlands. Why not Israel?
Yours
Neville Teller
The Jerusalem Post, 8 January 2012
Sir,
Zeev Feiner's statements about the inordinate delay in launching the projected new TV news station ("Kazakh billionaire's "Jewish Al Jazeera" in development", 5 January), sound pretty feeble to me. Either Alexander Mashkevitch is funding the new station or he isn't. If he is, why on earth is he trying to "draw more investors to the project"?
Nothing succeeds like success. Let him use a small proportion of his billions to get the station up and running, and others will join him to develop the project – if that is what he wants.
Redressing the media balance against the purely Islamist view of the Middle East that is pouring into millions of homes each day has been in the offing for literally years. It's about time for some action – either from Mashkevish, or from some other source, or preferably both.
Yours
Neville Teller
The Jerusalem Post, 20 December 2011
Sir
I find Martin Sherman's analysis ("Note to Newt (Part 1): Uninventing Palestinians", December 16) compelling, indeed convincing, but I am sure it would cut little ice with the great majority of opinion-leaders in the UK, who would dub it "special pleading".
Public opinion in Britain has little truck with arguments that rely on historical facts, or on opinions voiced more than a year or two back. Disastrous educational policies pursued for some fifty years in the UK have resulted in a generation pretty well cut off from its own historical roots, and with little understanding or patience with causes based, however logically, on history.
What moves the majority of the British public is what they believe they see being played out before their very eyes – a dispossessed people struggling to assert its identity against a power far stronger and denying them their rights.
It is for this reason that I anticipate Sherman's next article with some trepidation. Attempts to strip Palestinians of their national identity would in my view, at least as far the UK is concerned, almost certainly prove counter-productive, however watertight and logical the reasoning.
Instead, my own strong inclination would be to redouble the so-far inadequate efforts to put Israel's case positively and convincingly before the world in general, and the UK public in particular. To my mind the glaring omission has been the failure to launch a 24-hour English language TV news channel based in Jerusalem. With all the many sources of funding available throughout the world to support Jewish causes, how is it that Israel's voice has gone virtually unheard for all these years in the most important mass medium of all? Anyone in the UK has at their disposal, via the Sky network, news in English not only from the UK and the USA, but from France, Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia and Iran. There is no chance to click your remote control and find an Israeli point of view. Surely there is sufficient enterprise as well as cash out there to make this happen?
Yours
Neville Teller
The Jerusalem Post, 14 November 2011
Sir
The report “NGOs duel over proposed Basic Law to define Israel as Jewish State” (News, November 11) tells us of squabbles about the exact status of Arabic if the Basic Law is passed (the status of English, incidentally, is not even mentioned), but it all seems irrelevant to the main issue. If the Palestinian Authority can seek to have Palestine, within the old 1967 borders, declared a sovereign state by the United Nations, there can surely be few objections in principle to Israel passing a Basic Law declaring the country to be “the national home of the Jewish people”. Indeed, this is how Israel is perceived by large parts of the world, and would simply be restating the basis on which the League of Nations granted a mandate to Britain after the First World War.
The mandate was to implement the Balfour Declaration, in which the British Government had stated that it viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people.” This was also the assumption underlying the resolution of the UN General Assembly of 29 November 1947 which called for the establishment of a Jewish state.
The preamble to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, signed on 14 May 1948, is also unequivocal on this point: “This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their independent state is irrevocable.”
The Palestinian Authority in general, and Mahmoud Abbas in particular, have consistently refused to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. Well what is sauce for the Palestinian goose, is sauce for the Israeli gander. If unilateral declarations are the order of the day, why should it not be Israel’s turn?
Yours
Neville Teller
The Jerusalem Post, 4 October 2011
Sir
It was pleasant to read about Jason Pearlman's convivial exchanges about Israel, but they took place in tolerant north-west London where the Jewish presence has reached what might be termed “significant proportions” (ie something well under 20 percent of the population) in what is increasingly a multi-ethnic population. What Pearlman happily failed to encounter is the widespread anti-Israel sentiment that has become the accepted norm in left-wing circles. Across a broad swathe of British opinion formers – from national newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent and, sadly, the BBC, to the trade union movement and leading figures in academia – there is a total absence of empathy for Israel or its cause.
On the contrary, pro-Palestinian sentiment is so strong that it is commonplace to see Israel compared to apartheid South Africa, and consequently to find a consistent effort by activists to isolate Israel by supporting the boycott of Israeli academics and of Israeli exports. The illogicality of making common cause with anti-democratic Arab regimes and Islamist entities like Hamas, which oppose all the causes dear to British left-wing hearts (like equal rights for women and tolerance for gays), in opposition to the flourishing democracy that is Israel, seems totally lost in the current anti-Israel – and, one fears, anti-Jewish – sentiment that grips this area of British life.
Yours
Neville Teller
The Jerusalem Post, 29 August 2011
Sir
It would be difficult to dream up a more total recipe for disaster than Martin Sherman's wild-eyed call for the military re-conquest of Gaza ("White Flag Over Gaza", Into the Fray, August 26). What makes it worse is that his argument is not without a sort of misconceived logic.
All attempts at reconciling Israeli and Palestinian aspirations are indeed thwarted by the fact that Hamas, irredeemably rejectionist as it is, is the de facto government of Gaza. But how can the solution be for Israel to embark on a further military adventure with the unrealistic aim of forcing it to an unconditional surrender?
Sherman mentions "collective civilian casualties" as one consequence of his proposal to "crush Hamas by overwhelming force." But surely Cast Lead demonstrated the virtual impossibility of undertaking a military operation in Gaza City without inflicting incalculable loss of life, casualties, misery and disruption for innocent civilians.
The redoubled military effort he advocates would inevitably redouble this wholly undesirable outcome. International opinion would be outraged – and rightly so.
If Sherman wants Israel's political and military leaders hauled up before the International Court of Justice, he is going in the right direction.
Yours
Neville Teller
The Daily Telegraph (London), 4 August 2011
Sir
Benedict Brogan’s analysis (“Cameron must now persuade the Palestinians to see reason” – August 3) is acute and apposite, but deficient in one important respect. He fails to point out that the “grandiose unilateral gesture” planned by Mahmoud Abbas – a vote by the UN General Assembly in favour of recognising Palestine as a sovereign state ─ is opposed tooth and nail by his Palestinian partners, Hamas, the extremist group that seized control of Gaza in a bloody coup back in June 2007. Only a few days ago the Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar, categorised Abbas’s approach to the UN as a “political scam”. Hamas totally rejects the formation of a sovereign Palestine through the so-called “two-state solution” because it would require recognition of the state of Israel. “We are not going to recognize Israel,” said al-Zahar. “We are not going to accept Israel as the owner of one square centimetre.” Given these views, it is scarcely surprising that the “reconciliation agreement” between Fatah and Hamas, signed in May, has foundered, and the projected Palestinians unity government has failed to materialise. Throughout all the efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, the elephant in the room has been the rejectionist extremists of Hamas. How is a peaceful resolution possible until Hamas has been ousted from control of an integral part of any future sovereign Palestinian state?
Yours
Neville Teller
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